Let’s rewind to 2007.  Most of us probably had a “dumb phone” and didn’t use it for the internet much, and those of us who did use the internet were most likely using a baked in browser or something like Opera Mini.  Of course, in 2007, the iPhone became a reality and changed the way we used our mobile devices.

 

How does this relate to Flash?  Think about it, were we using Flash on our “dumb phones”?  Nope.  Opera Mini? Nope.  The game changing iPhone? Nope.  My point is that we’ve been dealing with a lack of Flash support on mobile for eternity.  Apple, often thought to be trendsetting in the marketplace, has denounced Flash.  Major web sites and well-known web gurus are all pushing HTML5, CSS3, etc to drive lightweight and manageable mobile development.

 

The reason I thought to write about this was because I have read a lot of recent articles about the new Motorola Xoom tablet and it’s lack of Flash support on launch (it will supposedly have Flash within a few weeks of launch).  I guess having Flash on a tablet may come in handy for movies and/or Flash based games.  Most notably, I think of my kids playing at nickjr.com or the Cartoon Network web site.

 

I know on my mobile phone, the Android-based Motorola Droid 2, that I have my Flash (and other plug-in) settings for my browser set to “on-demand”.  I do this to save battery, bandwith, and prevent slow page loads in my mobile browser.  I use my mobile phone a TON and there have been very few times I’ve actually NEEDED Flash.  One time that I do remember, I was trying to listen to a particular radio station via the browser and I had to click and enable the flash player to play the radio station.  However, I’ve since found a very good radio app.

 

Well, now that we’ve had Flash supported on Android devices, shouldn’t Flash be a big deal? Nope.  Why?  Because Flash isn’t a “showstopper” for 99.9% of people who use the web on their phone.  Okay, so I made that last percentage up, but you get the idea.  Place into evidence the following:

 

We were trained from the beginning to expect slighly less from mobile.  We wouldn’t expect a flash-based site to run on mobile.  Plus, factor in that people are now doing more standards-based HTML5/CSS3/JS stuff, and less with Flash that by the time we all come to expect awesomeness from our mobile web…They’ll be using HTML5/CSS3/JS, not Flash.  Or, they’ll have an app that handles those situations.

 

iPhone, the most loved smartphone since 2007 hasn’t supported Flash.  Has this been a problem? Of course not, people keep gobbling up the phones and raving madly about how much they love them.  I’ve never heard an iPhone user say “man, I wish this thing had Flash”.

 

I incur lots of data/web usage, performing a larger variety of web activity than the average user, and I’ve only encountered a few instances where I needed to use Flash on my Flash capable phone.

 

I’m tired of reading about Flash on mobile as if it’s a big deal.  Is it nice to have as a feature? Sure, but it’s not a deal breaker, or even an inconvenience for most people.  The web as a whole appears to be heading away from Flash usage.  Now, we just need to do the same with our writings and reviews of devices and web services.